2017 Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans: Public Symposium

2017 Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans: Public Symposium
Thursday, March 30, 2017
2:30–6pm
Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans (CAC)
900 Camp Street
New Orleans, LA 70130
FREE and open to the public

The Curatorial Intensive participants of the 2017 New Orleans program will each present their exhibition and project proposals, which they have developed over the course of the program.

The Curatorial Intensive is a weeklong professional development program which brings together emerging curators for the opportunity to exchange ideas, develop their curatorial practice, and learn from their colleagues. Please see the program details for more information.

presenter

Andrea Ancira is an independent writer and researcher based in Mexico City. She is interested in contemporary experimental artistic practices and their role in shaping social identities, discourses and sensibilities. When examining these practices— either in the field of sound or image— she has approached them from their possible implications in the conformation of ideas of utopia, revolution and the commons. The perspective from where she explores these phenomena is informed by multiple theoretical frameworks such as marxism, history of contemporary culture and politics, feminism, decolonial studies, among others. Her work has been published in academic and non-academic platforms. She is an associate curator of Centro de la Imagen for the upcoming exhibition of experimental filmaker Teo Hernández.

Kai Lumumba Barrow is the founder of Gallery of the Streets in New Orleans. For over 35 years her work has been grounded in efforts to end structural oppression and state violence. Her work intersects theories and practices that transgress the borders of the arts, academic, and organizing worlds. Barrow is a co-founder of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization to end the prison industrial complex, and currently sits on the Community Advisory Board. She has also worked with national, regional, and local organizations to coordinate and design convenings, trainings, mass mobilizations, nonviolent direct actions, and guerrilla theatre. She has campaigned to stop jail expansion; confront police violence; reveal prosecutorial misconduct; bring visibility to women prisoners, political prisoners, and people confined to control units; interrupt gender discrimination and bias within prisons, policing, and sentencing; challenge the human rights abuses of prisoners, former prisoners and their family members, and experiment with decarceration models for shrinking the system. As an artist, she is drawn to surrealism as a movement that, according to Robin D.G. Kelley, “invites dreaming, urges us to improvise and invent, and recognizes the imagination as our most powerful weapon.” In 2010, she formed Gallery of the Streets to “engage everyday spaces as sites of resistance.” An evolving national network of artists, activists, organizers, scholars, cultural workers, and community supporters, its signature program, visual opera, fuses public art and community engagement to confront power, provoke dialogue, and cultivate sustainable spaces. They identify points of intervention and create site-specific installations, and sound, movement, and visual compositions that are organized and performed in traditional and non-traditional spaces. They believe that art is an invitation for dialogue and can shift our ideas and our practices.

Naz Cuguoğlu is a curator and art writer, based in Istanbul. After working as the coordinator of maumau art residency in Istanbul for two years, currently she works as the Programs Manager of Zilberman Gallery (Istanbul & Berlin). She is the co-founder of Collective Çukurcuma, a non-profit art initiative, curating shows and events locally and internationally. She is the co-director of the artistic research project “IdentityLab” (Turkey & Sweden) consisting of journeys, meetings and public programs to create a dialogue and sense of community among artists and researchers working on identity issues. As part of this project, she co-edited “Between Places,” and co-curated IdentityLab Sessions at DEPO, Galata Greek Primary School and Swedish Consulate in Istanbul. As a member of the curatorial team “Proto5533”, she curated the exhibition “After Alexandria, the Flood” at 5533 (Istanbul). Her writing has been published in Timeout English, Art Unlimited, Istanbul Art News, Art South Africa, Artful Living and Trendsetter. She has participated in the CeRRCa art residency program in Spain. She received her BA in Psychology and MA in Social Psychology both at Koç University, Istanbul with a focus on culture studies.

Dorothée Dupuis is a French curator, writer and editor based in Mexico City. She was director of Triangle France in Marseille from 2007 to 2012. Founder and editor of Terremoto, and co-director of Petunia magazine, Dupuis is a dedicated feminist, her curatorial practice and writings seek to expose, question and challenge power structures in the eld of art. Her recent curatorial projects in 2016 included a residence in PAOS Gdl, Guadalajara, Adrien Vescovi in IFAL House of France, México DF, and the 30th International Studios Program in the FRAC Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, France. Her work has been published in several exhibition catalogs and publications including: ArtReview, Crash, Flash Art, Frieze, Kaleidoscope, Metropolis M, Mousse and Spike, among others.

Alexandria Eregbu is a conceptual artist. Her practice often takes shape in the form of educator, curator, and programmer. Alexandria’s concerns frequently address visibility, family, locality, and mobility. Her work tends to insert itself at the axis of personal experience and myth—usually reliant upon the collection of artifacts, material culture, and an attentiveness to current and historical events. During her participation at ICI’s Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans, Alexandria will be focusing on her curatorial work on AfroSurrealism, and reigniting Chicago’s Surrealist past. Alexandria has been featured in several exhibitions from Milwaukee, WI; St. Louis, MO; Boston, MA; Brooklyn, NY; and of course her in hometown Chicago, IL. She was a recipient of the Propeller Fund Grant (2013); the Individual Artist Grant from Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (2015); and the 3Arts Award in the Teaching Artist category (2016). She has received fellowships as Resident Curator with HATCH Projects (2013-14); Public Studio Artist in Residence at the Chicago Cultural Center (2015); Resident Artist at the Stony Island Arts Bank and the Center for Afrofuturist Studies (2016). Most recently, Alexandria was highlighted in Time Out Chicago (2016) and listed in Newcity’s “Breakout Artists: Chicago’s Next Generation of Image Makers” (2015). She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Queta Beasley Harris, a native of New Orleans, is an applied urban anthropologist, ethnographer, urban design and sustainability curator, visual artist, and movement instructor. Her interests focus on the relationship between semiotics, contingency and context of storytelling; naturalization and social construction of identity; strategies re-imagining place and space in urban environments; holistic design in developing global markets; and the politics of geography on global organizational landscapes. Her current research centers on transnational collaboration and feminist women of color networks utilizing art, movement building and activism as sites of resistance. Queta has facilitated cultural adaptation workshops for professional development and has lectured on conceptualizing alternative integrative wellness practices within appropriate socio-cultural context. She has worked with organizations such as the Gulf Coast Fellowship for Community Transformation - funded by the Ford Foundation, Xavier University of New Orleans Department of Psychology, and Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Queta serves on the advisory board for Gallery of the Streets and was a collaborating artist for Ecohybridity: A Love Song for Nola. She is a member of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology (SUNTA). Queta is co-founder and ethnographer of La Nouvelle Consulting.

Ladi’Sasha Jones is a writer and arts administrator based in Harlem, New York. She has written for Aperture, IAM magazine, and Recess. Recent curatorial projects include Dreaming of Kin, an exhibition featuring artist Tiona McClodden (2016); the Emmett Till Project, a digital commemoration of 60th anniversary of the murder and trial of Emmett Louis Till (2015); Writing Blackness: Harlem | Paris, an exhibit of archival materials from the Schomburg Center collection in collaboration with the site-specific project, If You Build It (No Longer Empty, 2014); and The Way Out Is Through, a literary art-book featuring commissioned works from three women writers (published 2015). Ladi’Sasha is currently the Project Manager for IdeasCity, a platform of the New Museum for Contemporary Art. She holds a B.A. in African American Studies from Temple University and a M.A. in Arts Politics from NYU, Tisch School of the Arts.

José López Serra’s praxis concerns the concepts & practices of everyday life manifested through formal / informal means. His work deals with diverse topics such as the political / social constitution of the Puerto Rican nationality & the hegemonic colonial ideology, art making processes, and the diffusion of collective imagery, through photography, installation, sculpture, video, painting, and found objects. Related to the idea of becoming, understood as the flux of development and creation of the structures that we employ to understand the everyday surrounding, he experiments with hybrid forms inside these established fields. José López Serra earned his BA in Advertising and Public Relations from the School of Communications and Photography from the Department of Fine Arts, Humanities Faculty, of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus. He is a co-founder and director of Hidrante, a project space in San Juan, PR. He has participated in the Summer Sessions (2014, 2015), organized by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and Beta-Local. Recent exhibitions include Action Painter, Hidrante, San Juan, PR; 1a. Trienal de Arte del Centro Comunitario de Península de Cantera, a project of the 4ta Trienal Poligráfica, San Juan, PR; and Iconoclasmo(s), Casa de Cultura RUTH Hernandez Torres, San Juan, PR.

Ximena Moreno is a researcher based in Santiago, Chile. She received her MA in Global Arts from Goldsmiths University of London. Her work focuses on managing visual arts projects and research for publishing and curatorial purposes. While in London, she collaborated writing for Artishock and La Panera Magazine. Until March 2017, she was the producer at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC), which belongs to Universidad de Chile. She participated in “Towards Tomorrow’s Museum” programme at Tate Modern, London and in “Politics of near Futures: Possibilities, Prophecies, Prognoses” a summer school at Heidelberg University. Moreno received Becas Chile (2013-2014) a scholarship given by the Chilean government and also Santander Scholarship for Latin American students (2013) given by Goldsmith University of London. Currently she is co-founder of Revista Porvenir, a visual culture digital magazine and professor. Starting in April 2017, she will work as the Coordinator of Visual Arts at Matucana 100, a Cultural Center located in Santiago.

Ekrem Serdar is a curator & programmer from Ankara, Turkey. He is the Media Arts Curator at Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center (2015–present), where he is responsible for the organization’s exhibitions, public programming, and artist residency. Recent exhibitions include solo shows by Kathy High, Sondra Perry, and Wenhua Shi, along with screenings of work by Nazlı Dinçel, Jason Livingston, and Skawennati. He is the co-founder of Experimental Response Cinema, a micro-cinema in Austin, TX, where he programmed moving image works between 2012–2015. Independently, he has programmed works by Hollis Frampton, Phil Hoffman, along with Küçük Sinemalar, a survey of experimental cinema from Turkey. His writings have appeared in Millennium Film Journal, INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media, 5harfliler, and Altyazi. He received a Professional Development Fellowship to attend the 2015 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar (Hamilton, NY), and was a participant of the Oberhausen Seminar at the 2016 International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. He is on the board of directors of Dreamland, a LGBTQ arts space in Buffalo, and is an advisory member of both Experimental Response Cinema, and the FOL Cinema Society in Istanbul. He completed his MFA at the Department of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo.

Vere van Gool is a curator and writer based in New York. Currently, Vere works at the New Museum as Associate Director of IdeasCity — a residency and forum that explores the role of art and culture beyond the walls of the museum. IdeasCity brings together experimental visions for the future of art, activism, and cities shaped by a commitment to cultural practice and social justice. Its educational and public programs have featured John Akomfrah, Tania Bruguera, Theaster Gates, Sophia Al-Maria, and Hito Steyerl, amongst others. Vere’s work and writing has been published internationally.

Jess Wilcox is the Director of Exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park in Astoria Queens. Since joining Socrates in 2016, she has curated park’s 30th anniversary exhibition, LANDMARK, Folly 2016, and the 2016 Emerging Artist Fellowship exhibition. Previously she worked at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she organized public programs and projects including Between the Door and the Street, a performance initiated by Suzanne Lacy and A Butterfly for Brooklyn, a pyrotechnic work presented in Prospect Park by Judy Chicago, among others. She also co-curated Agitprop!, a group exhibition that evolved over time and incorporated artists as co-curators. She has organized shows at Abrons Art Center, ISCP, Performa, and SculptureCenter, among others. She holds a B.A. from Barnard College and a M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. Currently she is organizing Socrates Sculpture Park’s first single artist exhibition, Nari Ward: G.O.A.T., again.

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Independent Curators International (ICI) produces exhibitions, events, publications, research and training opportunities for curators and diverse audiences around the world. Established in 1975 and headquartered in New York, ICI is a hub that connects emerging and established curators, artists, and art spaces, forging international networks and generating new forms of collaborations. ICI provides access to the people and practices that are key to current developments in the field, inspiring fresh ways of seeing and contextualizing contemporary art.

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